Compton Mackenzie
COUNT high among the pleasures of old age the news of honours conferred upon admired friends and acquain- tances, and the Birthday Honours of June 10th were (unusually generous in this respect.
Dr. Edith Sitwell is the greatest poet that the women of England have yet produced and the Order of the British Empire Was beginning to look rather ridiculous on Parnassus without Dr. Sitwell as a Dame. It was, indeed, high time that her stature was formally acknowledged. I had a strong suspicion nearly forty years ago that she would in time displace my beloved Christina Rossetti from her supremacy; with the passage of the years a rich maturity has given to Edith Sitwell's genius the glow of a golden harvest. When I shall have the pleasure of addressing her as Dame Edith I shall be addressing, kvith a prefix hallowed by childhood's fairy dreams, a figure of English history.
Many of us have wondered for a long time when Somerset Maugham would receive a recognition that seemed so long overdue. Well, it has been accorded at long last, at very long last, for Somerset Maugham was eighty years old last January. I was only a boy of fourteen when I read his first novel Liza' of Lambeth. It has always seemed strange to me that during this century the contribution of actors to public entertainment should have been recognised so much more prodigally than the contribution of novelists and dramatists. A distinguished elder statesman of today once asked me some thirty years ago why we novelists always jeered at politicians. 1 told him it must be because we were always excluded from the Honours List in favour of actors and organists. Being at that time a politician himself and not yet an elder statesman, he took my answer seriously. Who do you think ought to have a knighthood ? " he asked. 1 nominated an obvious candidate and he said he should take an early opportunity of bringing the name of that novelist to the attention of the Prime Minister. Unfortunately my nominee died a month later and so I never had the satisfaction of knowing if the suggestion had been heeded.
I shall take this opportunity of saying that Hilaire Belloc was offered a CH and that he did not reply to the letter asking whether the proposal to recommend him for the honour was agreeable to him. I should add that the offer was made at a time when Belloc was ill and unhappy and when, his sister Mrs. Belloc Lowndes told me, he was paying no attention to any kind of correspondence.
To return to the question of entertainment. It is probably true to say that a writer who feels that the entertainment of readers is his primary duty is viewed in official and academic Circles with distrust. When the University of Oxford gave P. G. Wodehouse a D. Litt, it was regarded as a manifestation of coy donnish humour, of Senior Common Room whimsy. Apparently it annoyed his fellow-authors, to judge by the unanimity with which so many of them rushed into print to disown him after those completely harmless broadcasts he gave from Berlin. It was as revolting an exhibition of kicking a man when he was down as I can remember. I wrote a letter in his defence to the Daily Telegraph, which had opened its columns to abuse of 'him, but, in the perfervid patriotism of the emotional moment which at that date was unpleasantly coloured by the funk into which the German victories had put some people, my letter was not printed.
W. Somerset Maugham has always made it clear that he wanted to etr".artain his readers, and if he had died before he was seventy his enduring vitality and industry, his fine crafts, manship and prodigious fertility, and his artistic integrity woulci have gained him little more than a sigh for poor Yorick fror4 constipated intellectuals who prefer the dried senna-pods o criticism to the fresh marrowfat peas of creation. Maugham's obstinate survival for another decade has compelled admiration' for his achievement, and this belated CH is an expression of the high regard to which he is so abundantly entitled.
If Mr. Arthur Bryant had written nothing except his study of Charles II, I should have thought knighthood was his meet reward, such a lot of Whig misrepresentation ' was thrown on the rubbish-heap when that book appeared. How much more he has done since to deserve it is comfortably obvious.
The general public is always more interested to read of the knighthood of figures with whom many of them are familiar; the knighthood of a worthy man for political and public services in Loamshire inevitably\suggests that the services were more political than public. Eda when the man in the street, at any rate in England, reads that a knighthood has been given to somebody like Mr. John Cameron, QC. Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Member, industrial Disputes Tribunal, he will suppose that some dryasdust lawyer has been rewarded for his astute caution. The man in the street could not be more wrong. ' Jock' Cameron is the most brilliant advocate in Scotland, who has served with distinction in both great wars, who can sail a boat with anyone, and who if he had not followed the law as a profession might have been a painter of renown. I can imagine no more suitable figure to be a knight of today, The CBE as a recognition of the arts is a comparatively new device, and it is a pity that we do not have two words for ' commander' like the Italians so that we could distinguish between a naval' commander and the commander of an order of chivalry. Two old and dear friends of mine have been given the CBE in the Birthday Honours, and if they were Italians I should be addressing them as commendatore. However, I cannot call Eric Linklater ' commander without imperilling his military status as a major. No author alive today has done more to deserve' the rose and grey ribbon of the Order of the British Empire round his collar, and may he laugh long to enjoy it ! The other commendatore is Arnold Haskell, the Director of. the Sadler's Wells Ballet School. I may have played a humble part in focussing attention on his services by per- suading him to grow a beard. I watched over the growth of Arnold Haskell's beard from the time it was as sparse as a sowing of winter wheat until it became the ample but always trim boskage of today when it is the authentic beard of a commendatore, almost a corner of the Borghese Gardens. No doubt if Arnold Haskell had remained clean-shaven his services to the ballet would have been recognised, but that beard was worth a decoration for its own services, and I think it should have been mentioned in the Honours List as well as his Directorship.
Another CBE that gave me particular pleasure was that of Mr. AndreNV Stewart, the Controller of the Home Service of the BBC; and how much more heart-warming it was to read of Mr. Gerald Moore's CBE for services to music than of Mr. X — Y —'s for political and public services in Eatanswill. Finally, may I, without offending the Daily Express, congratu- late D-r. W. F. Starkie, the Director of the British Institute in Madrid, upon his CMG ? He has been of immense value to British prestige in Spain; I doubt if he has spent much more than three or four millions of the taxpayers' money and by doing so robbed the football pools.
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